Thoughts on real web development

Given that there is (quite rightly) an awful lot of talk, articles and discussion on new and upcoming web technology and methods in our industry, I feel that it can be quite disappointing for someone new to the industry, in their first job, who may not be using any of these technologies. Let me assure you that you are not alone.

Those who read my blog and/or follow me on Twitter will know that I have a very keen interest in HTML5, CSS3 and other new web technologies. As a web developer, so should you. But I don’t get to use them every day and I suspect many other web developers don’t either. There are many client projects that I work on that don’t take advantage of any of these new technologies (at least not yet) and of course there are others that do.

There can be many reasons why your company may not be using any of these new technologies and techniques, and these can range from your “old-school” boss who thinks he knows better simply not listening, to legacy systems that require Internet Explorer 6 to 8 support only.

Great new techniques such as responsive web design cost money, and sometimes a client simply doesn’t have the budget to take this into consideration.

If you have started out and this is the way it seems to be, don’t fret. You’re not alone and it won’t always be this way.

It’s not too hard to sneak in the HTML5 doctype or some CSS3 on your next project.

Continue to read up on anything new and practice at home.

Don’t stop learning.

But remember that there will always be those one or two projects that will cling on to old technologies for dear life and you will just have to deal with with them. Such is life.

5 Responses

We’re also in a very unique industry where you can implement the very latest standards or even experimental CSS properties into your project today which will also degrade gracefully in older browsers so not to affect the browsing experience of those users.

There aren’t many industries in which your end product gets better with time (assuming you implement cutting edge web standards and users upgrade their browser).

I try and use HTML5 semantic markup, ARIA roles and CSS3 properties on every project where I can, no matter how small the project or the budget. They don’t add much more time to the build.

But you will always get that annoying client that will demand a certain font to be used for headings and not agree on a web font, forcing you to have images with embedded text, like it’s the year 2000 all over again.